Book 3, Chapter 19

To make things easier, I built my own little abode on a nearby mountain. Perhaps the brakvaw would have accommodated my stay, but I wasn’t all that trusting, and, besides, my magic could very well have interfered with their unending circuit of mana. It didn’t seem likely—none of my spells had caused any problems so far—but I was planning on being there for months and that meant setting up a few long-term enchantments.

The brakvaw knew where I was, of course, but as part of the stone shape spell I used to round out the cave and flatten the ground, I also resized the entrance to a normal human doorway, which would make it difficult for any of the giant birds to get in. Even if they shrunk down to the size of the fledglings I’d met, they’d still have to waddle across the threshold, and my wards would give me plenty of warning.

Once I was comfortably settled in with the cave fully warded and a few essential pieces of furniture that I’d brought via phantom space set up, the lessons began in earnest. They started by going over the things I’d already been experimenting with for the last week and what other directions I could take. Grandfather confirmed a few principles that I’d be feeling my way around, trying to nail down the specifics of, and that allowed me to shift my practice away from some dead ends I hadn’t seen coming.

Learning to use mana this way was frustrating in a way I hadn’t known in close to two thousand years. I felt like an amateur, fumbling around in the dark trying to do something my body just wasn’t made for while literal babies breezed past me. I’d pushed the boundaries of what magic could do many times, but back then, I’d been building upon centuries of knowledge.

This was different. And after the first month of Grandfather’s tutelage, I was starting to think it just wasn’t possible for humans to use mana this way. Everything I knew told me that shouldn’t be the case, but if I couldn’t master even the most basic spells using this technique, what hope did anyone else have of using it? Something about the brakvaw was just different from humans.

I’d seen it plenty of times before when studying various monsters or magical animals. I was pushing hard for it this time both because it would be immensely useful in this mana-starved world I’d been reborn into and because I had what I was pretty sure was the oldest and most powerful of their entire species personally tutoring me.

Stubbornness in the face of adversity was a mixed quality. In many ways, it was a good thing to have. It forced me to come up with clever solutions where sheer power failed me. It had been that unyielding resolve to find a way that had resulted in the creation of the soul invocations I’d used to keep my memories through my reincarnation. On the other hand, it had also sometimes led me deep into research that I knew was flawed, but which I refused to give up on until well past the point where a lesser mage would have admitted defeat.

So it was here. A reasonable person would have bowed to the inevitable conclusion: like so many other forms of magic, this one just wasn’t compatible with the human body and mind. But the prospect of cycling my mana to be used over and over again instead of expended and lost was so tantalizing that I refused to give up on it.

And then, six weeks after my training under Grandfather’s watchful eye began, I had a breakthrough.

  *

“You’re doing well with the cycling,” Grandfather told me. “I see no mana loss at all, not even when you extend it out from your core.”

“Yes, but shaping it into a spell still eludes me,” I said. “I’ve tried every spell I can think of, from the simplest novice-tier invocation to ruinously expensive master-tier spells, and I’m no closer to getting one of them to catch than I was on the day we started.”

“You have not learned the breath,” Grandfather stated. “Without that, you will never succeed.”

He wasn’t actually talking about breathing, but something unique to brakvaw culture that didn’t translate from their cawing language to anything I could understand. We’d both expressed frustration over that concept, him for not being able to explain it and me for not being able to piece together what he was trying to say. We had probably three millennia of magical expertise between the two of us, and that concept defied translation.

It had something to do with cycling mana, obviously, but every time I thought I was on the right trail, Grandfather would just shake his head and tell me I was wrong. After the first few times of mulishly insisting on exploring my idea, I’d learned to trust him.

I sent a tendril of mana out again, carefully guiding it to create the shape of the spell I needed, then bringing it back to my mana core. The magic didn’t trigger, because of course it didn’t. None of the mana was going into the spell. It was an empty shell.

“No,” Grandfather said. “Breath.”

I scowled at him and pulled the mana back into my core. At least I was good enough at this method of mana manipulation to know that I was no longer losing any of it to the air around me. That hadn’t taken much effort to master, being a natural extension of my already perfect control over internal mana.

“Your mana does not breathe like it should,” Grandfather said again for probably the hundredth time. “I am sorry. I cannot explain this better than I already have. I can only tell you that this is the problem you are having. You are holding the mana’s breath in. It cannot make magic like this.”

Grandfather cast a basic light spell. His control was a bit sloppy, but considering his mana core was probably a hundred times bigger than mine, it was hard to blame him. He didn’t have a lot of need for finesse, not with those reserves, which made it all the more amusing that his people had developed such an efficient system of casting spells. He was casting through a projection of himself from miles away, and so much of his mana was going right back into him that it was still more efficient than my own light spell.

“Like this,” Grandfather said, going through the spell a few times while I watched.

I wove the same spell, the exact same way, using my own mana, but nothing happened. Grandfather sighed and murmured, “No breath.”

The only difference was that my version of the spell didn’t lose any mana to the air while I was weaving it. That was it. It was identical in every other—

“Of course,” I said. “Breath. Do it again. I need to see the spell one more time.”

Grandfather tilted his head. “You have gained an understanding?” he asked. “Good.”

Then he wove the spell, but I ignored the mana cycling out of his core and back in, and instead looked at the wisps rising out of the spell structure. They dissipated, but it wasn’t into the air as I’d thought. The further away from the spell they got, the finer they grew until they were so impossibly small that it looked like they disappeared into nothing.

And that was the mana that made the spell work. Grandfather’s control wasn’t sloppy. Hell, it might even be better than mine, considering the hundreds of wispy tendrils even a simple light spell let out. They made a cloud of mana, one that not only powered the spell, but which in turn looped right back in, weaving their way through other strands.

Slowly, I rebuilt my own cycling spell structure, only this time I made it imperfectly. Wisps of mana leaked out, but not nearly as many as Grandfather’s spell had. Still, the image of the old man nodded.

“Yes,” he said. “Breath!”

Now that I could see what he was referring to, I got it. The spell did almost seem to breathe, exhaling out mana and then pulling it back in. It was like a cycle within a cycle, except that I was struggling to control those smaller wisps. I would have said I was starting too big, but it didn’t get much simpler than creating light from mana.

“No, no, you do not control your breath. You simply breathe. Relax and let the breath cycle itself.”

I grit my teeth and tried to relax my control over the mana as the old man suggested, but a very long lifetime of refining my mana manipulation skills made it difficult to give it free rein to behave as it liked. There was a balancing act in here, I knew, a fine line between losing control of the spell completely and letting it slip just enough that it could breathe. Trying to manually force the motion wasn’t working, not even for a light spell.

I let more of the mana bleed out, but instead of looping around, it simply vanished into the parched desert wasteland, never to be seen again. Frowning, I let the spell cycle back into my core and started over again.

An hour later, I finally found the perfect balance between control and freedom. My cycled light spell could breathe, and I smiled in satisfaction as the glowing orb floated overhead.

“Congratulations,” Grandfather said. “You’ve taken the first step, one that many of our elders did not believe was possible.”

“I don’t know that I ever could have figured this one out on my own,” I admitted. “I’ve spent a life time learning perfect control over my mana. This… letting go, taking advantage of the mana’s natural tendency to curl back around on itself when it’s being cycled, that’s not something I’ve ever seen. I could perhaps have made this discovery on my own as a young man if I’d met one of your kind and seen it demonstrated back then, but not today.”

“You’re too modest, my friend. Do not dwell on what might have been. You have successfully cast a light spell in the magical traditions of my people. Now, I think that’s enough practice for one day. You should take the rest of the night off and celebrate.”

I wasn’t much for celebrating, and despite the ball of light representing an important first step, it was still only a first step. I had a lot of work to do, but I had plenty of time to accomplish it. Grandfather and I had spoken of core advancement, and he knew how much I expected my reserves to grow once my physical body had reached full maturity. We’d decided to hold off on determining whether I should attempt to handle the spell that held the floating island up until I’d fully mastered brakvaw casting, but with the knowledge that if I wasn’t able to control a mana cycle that large now, I would have a much better chance soon.

“I have too much work to do,” I told him. “We can celebrate after we complete the project. Now that I’ve got this part figured out though, I think I can begin to advance without your direct guidance, which is good. I need to return home to check on things and restock my supplies here.”

Specifically, I was running out of my ointment of aging, and since I hadn’t been home to tend the gardens and greenhouses, I was relying on Hyago to have procured the reagents I needed to make more. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust him, nor was it the end of the world if he failed, but I didn’t like leaving things up to others if I could do them myself. My inability to feel comfortable delegating tasks and trusting people to complete them was just one of the reasons I’d never ruled a country of my own.

“Your body is young,” Grandfather said, his tone lightly scolding. “Do not be in such a rush. Enjoy your renewed youth.”

“Plenty of time for that once the work is done,” I said. “Thank you for your help. I’ll continue to practice on my own, and I should return in about a week or so.”

Grandfather let out an exaggerated sigh and waved me off. “Go on then, if you must.”