tobiasbegley

PSTH: Chapter Forty-Seven

Given that Primals don’t have biology, and reproduce through either budding off new, semi-cloned versions of themselves or by being generated outright by an essence heart, why do so many of them have distinct genders? Well, as far as we can tell, humans are mostly to blame. Evidence from the Post-Arrival but Pre-Modern Era is hard to come by, but from what we can tell, many early Primals were agender, or something close to it, having no concept of gender whatsoever. Like if aliens landed on...

PSTH: Chapter Forty-Six

Sponsorships are something of considerable debate when it comes to the Tamer’s Consortium. While corporate sponsorships aren’t too much of an issue, older tamers sponsoring younger ones with money, materials, and mentorship has a small but tangible benefit, especially in the beginning stages, where up and coming tamers might not have access to better spells. But tamer mentorships are a tradition that’s existed since Primals first came to Earth. What’s what this meeting is really about...

The Third Step: Chapter Seventy-Four

Naturally, I was immediately tempted to go into Dusk’s realm and look over the paper that had been passed to me, but that was simply untenable for now. The Storm King had eyes everywhere, and even if he hadn’t been watching, and if the privacy technique and near-instant pass had been enough to hide a single sheet of paper – something I was not entirely certain on – exposing it now by rushing into Dusk’s realm would be foolish. I continued to wander around the town for some time, and...

The Third Step: Chapter Seventy-Three

“So at the end of the day, you need money,” I said, glancing around the group while taking a sip from my cup of coffee. Unfortunately for you, I really don’t have much rent money. What little money I had was just spent on advancement resources, and I only have about two dozen Mossford Standard Silver in cash. Not sure how that converts to tael.” 

It had taken the group quite some time to be convinced that I really wasn’t going to just kill them all. The solar mage, in par...

The Third Step: Chapter Seventy-Two

I didn’t like the arrows. First of all, I wasn’t an archer, so I couldn’t even use them as intended. Second of all, it wasn’t my power. Something like the Frozen Time let me better use my own power, and even the cyan crystal would operate not too horribly dissimilarly to my Ephemeral Rebirth. Other, more permanent, equipment could amplify my power in its own way or become a true part of my style. The arrows weren’t my power, they weren’t tangential to abilities I already had, and ...

PSTH: Chapter Forty-Five

Not sure I love this new Tamer Consortium rules update. With a maximum of four Primals per person for any fight, it means that any Tamer who has five, six, even seven or eight bonds is somewhat punished for having so many. Sure, it allows for a bit more strategy for them, where they can build multiple teams out of their team, but it still feels like it’s just bowing to people who are too stupid to go out and collect as many Primals as their spirit can handle without damage. I don’t believ...

PSTH: Chapter Forty-Four

Magic provided a solution to a lot of problems. Nearly any injury can be healed, if it’s fresh enough. Underlying conditions are harder to deal with, but there are options, especially as magitechnical implants and prosthetics become easier to create and more advanced. A single wood spell made the old seeds created by corporations that didn’t produce fruits with viable seeds in them obsolete. Topsoil depletion was a bigger problem, but one that enough earth magians could handle. The one pr...

PSTH: Chapter Forty-Three

There seems to be a strong dislike for bugs in the Pre-Arrival cultural artifacts that we have been able to dig up. There are people who advocated for the extermination of mosquitoes, records of people screaming at the mere sight of a spider, and the tiny insects seem to have possessed some ability to interfere with their technology – though given that essence destroyed a large amount of it, we’re unable to figure out the why or the how of this. And while I’m certainly not advocating to...

The Third Step: Chapters Sixty Eight, Sixty Nine, Seventy, and Seventy-One

So, due to the weirdness of the upcoming American holiday (And the friends and family moving around to visit that come with it), I've had to post all Mana Mirror chapters today, on Monday. Primal Soul, Tamer's Heart will still go up as per usual on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Sorry for the inconvenience! But hey, at least you get an extra chapter out of it?

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Chapter Sixty-Eight

I spent nearly all my time over the next several days doin...

PSTH: Chapter Forty-Two

Why do Primals have the urge to bud their essence, when essence hearts are perfectly capable of producing a Primal from seemingly nothing but time and ambient essence – the very thing they produce? The answer is simpler than you may expect. Primals, like humans, can’t live forever. Outside of suspended animation like an egg, most Primals live around fifty to sixty years. Despite Hearts creating them, they do so slowly. Too slowly to account for the number of Primals in the world. In the e...

PSTH: Chapter Forty-One

Gifts are a fascinating topic. All biological organisms on record – billions in total – have the same gift, the ability to aspect their core to a different sort. It’s fairly useful as gifts go. Nothing staggering, but useful. But let’s be real. The slide on your augpads says ‘Essence Heart Basics’, so we all know what I’m about. Near as we can tell, Essence Hearts’ gift is either its ability to hold so many bonds, to select guardians, or a combination of both. I personally don...

PSTH: Chapter Forty

Storage gems. Common, but interesting, magical items. They rely on the fact that Primals have no biological tissue whatsoever in order to operate, bending essence in such a way that the Primal is able to recover faster and remain in a semi-conscious state, like the liminal state between sleeping and wakefulness. It’s quite pleasant. Now, the main way this is accomplished is through growing plastic crystals out of materials left over from the Pre-Arrival era. We are currently looking into ot...

The Third Step: Chapter Sixty-Seven

“What do you mean you’ve never done clap pushups?!” Liz asked, her voice holding back a mix of disbelief and laughter. “What’s the point of having superhuman strength if not to use it?”

“My full-gates infuse the created spell circuits with energy from it. The strength is really more of a byproduct of more efficient and powerful casting,” I responded. “I do some physical training, sure, with sparring and such. But I don’t think I’ve done things like clap pushups sin...

The Third Step: Chapter Sixty-Six

The orb rose into the air, and I began clashing with my opponent. For better or worse, I’d definitely been right about the state of my mana senses, as I was able to force the orb back quickly, but they were also fundamentally unstable. Every half second or so, they practically turned off entirely, letting her push the orb back in my direction. 

“Two steps forward, one step back,” I said, only realizing that I’d voiced the thought aloud a moment later. I started to giggle, a...

The Third Step: Chapter Sixty-Five

If I failed now, it might be fine. But it being fine was predicated on the idea that I would easily win future events, which there was no guarantee of. Worse, what if I was in another situation like this, arguing if I needed to strain myself? Better to push myself early in the tournament, in a situation where I’d be working with a team, than in a one-on-one duel. 

I conjured my Runelight Lens into one hand, and a handful of materials into the other. A calcified eye, mana sources,...

PSTH: Chapter Thirty-Nine

I was nothing before the arrival of dungeon hearts. When magic came back, I thought… well… I thought I’d be a hero. I thought that my military background would make me special. That instead of being stuck in a dead end job working for a boss who makes in an hour what I make in ten years, I'd be the one who went out conquering dungeons, slaying monsters, and living out my dreams. Well, I guess I’m fighting a dungeon tomorrow. Only the rewards are going to my boss, because he’s able t...

PSTH: Chapter Thirty-Eight

Greed is a poison. Oh, certainly, everyone needs to have their needs met. More than that, people want to live well, not just to survive. But the creeping desire to have more and more and more, with no mind for the costs to the people beneath you on the ladder of wealth or power or whatever else there may be? That is a sickness. And for the life of me, I can’t understand why Pre-Arrival culture seemed to venerate that ideology as the greatest guiding light the world had to offer. 

PSTH: Chapter Thirty-Seven

Immortality. The goal of countless Obsidian Kings, research groups, and wood magians. But is it actually possible? Even if you look at the issues with biological immortality, such as telomere shortening, there are issues with the ousia. It begins to fray into threads that require constant maintenance after roughly a hundred and fifty years. The Obsidian Kings drained the ousia of others to repair their own, but that was a patchwork with efficiency drops each time it was used. And that’s to ...

The Third Step: Chapter Sixty-Four

Okay,  so the event ‘Sensory Sphereoids’ might not literally be tug of war, but to my mind, it was basically tug of war. The event was one of the ones that could potentially net me the training time needed to keep Ikki and Orykson around for a bit longer, and I’d signed up for it immediately. I was actually going as Malachi this time, rather than as the fox, and I even hid my tail away within my soul mana to stop me from being linked to the other identity. It was fairly well-known ...

The Third Step: Chapter Sixty-Three

I spent that night processing the golden soul potion, which helped condense my mana slightly. It wasn't nearly as dramatic as the first time I'd drunk one, not after having taken so many drops of destiny and advanced so far, but the following morning, my mana definitely felt denser. After a couple of morning chores, Dawn, Dusk, Ed, Liz, and her grandfather all trained together in the garden, and I walked into the vault. The armored ghostly guardian – now burning with the power of peak fourt...

The Third Step: Chapter Sixty-Two

“I’ll be training, probably,” I said, waving a hand. I knew that I needed to find where the Sekhem earring had gone, but I could use every bit of training right now if I wanted to get far enough to potentially enter the top eight and earn some personalized prizes like a spellbinder rose. 

And frankly, I felt like a spellbinder rose had gone from a desire to a need. The Craftsman and Orykson had both commented on the fact my staff was consuming all of the space in my spirit, t...

PSTH: Chapter Thirty-Six

Voice One: What’s the deallll with four core slots? You’re telling me that– Oh. You actually have an answer? I mean, this isn’t really th–

Voice Two: Well, think of the core like a cell. The ‘organelle’ of ousia within the condensed core that serves to link the pneuma and anima pools is almost perfectly cuboidal. With the pools each taking up one face of this ‘cube’, that leaves four empty spaces. It’s in these blank spaces that patterns for spells are etched. Now, t...

PSTH: Chapter Thirty-Five

Why don’t Primals eat?! This does not make sense at all! I’m… What do they subsist on? I know that their bodies are made purely of ousia structures rather than atomic structures, and they sustain themselves on essence, either through cultivating, or through battle. Great! Fine! Lovely! No problems! But then, what happens when they eat? They can eat matter, and it’s just… Gone? Is it gone? Gone forever? Are Primals matter black holes? Does it get converted into essence? Does it get t...

Possible (Probable) Delay in Chapters

Hello everyone! For the last few days feeling a bit under the weather, only for it to worsen today, and it's going into pneumonia. I'm now on some medication, as well as a nebulizer every four hours, so I should hopefully be on the path to recovery.

I had been hoping the poor writing days earlier in the week wouldn't be an issue, as I'd be quick to bounce back, then just put in some extra time over the weekend, and that chapters could continue as normal. That now seems unlikely. I'll p...

PSTH: Chapter Thirty-Four

And so, we come to the end of our miniseries! So sad to see you all go… But we’re going out with a bang. Or maybe I should say, going out with a flash? Hah! Radiance, also known as light, transcendence, celestial, and a handful of other things, is a strange one. It covers light magic, meaning it has its own versions of illusions and such, it can do some minor healing spells as well, and it also covers a sort of ‘radiant’ power that doesn’t seem to exist in the pre-magical world. It�...

The Third Step: Chapter Sixty-One

Thankfully, the Patriarch didn’t take long to dismiss us, as he quickly turned to talking to the crowd and trying to build up hype around the fights, pointing out several of the key individuals in the fight: the mysterious blood mage, seemingly capable of completely shutting off someone’s magic. The woman with the bonded blade whose speed allowed her to blitz through opponents with ease. The indomitable vegetable cleaver who had cast one spell throughout the entire fight. 

Wait...

The Third Step: Chapter Sixty

For some reason, the first thing that flashed through my head was that I felt sorry for the people broadcasting the match. They’d have to either broadcast Kamal’s foul language, or try to bleep it out mid-broadcast. Could they do that? 

Then I didn’t have time to think of anything else as he revealed just what his fourth gate phoenix mana could do. There was an absolutely massive surge of mana, the kind of thing that suggested he’d poured almost all of his prodigious reserv...

The Third Step: Chapter Fifty-Nine

In response to the question, I flung a hand out, as if offering a handshake. That probably had been a mistake, as the summoner tensed, fingers crackling with lightning, before he relaxed. 

“My name’s Mal, what’s yours?” 

“Dario,” the summoner responded. 

“Any relation to the Amethyst Mask?” I asked, which caused him to tilt his head to the side. The golden mouse on his shoulder, whose mana seemed to pulse with a mix of knowledge, mental, tellur...

PSTH: Chapter Thirty-Three

Where do essence hearts come from? We don’t know for sure. They're clearly solidified essence, and made of the same stuff as an essence stone, but what does that actually tell us? Measurements of essence levels in areas that have formed an essence heart don’t decrease. In fact, they actually increase! It seems to be a violation of the conservation of energy. It also raises the question of where essence itself came from? Some point to brane cosmology, and think it has always been here, but...

Updates, Future Roadmap, and Holiday Breaks!

Hello everyone! Thank you all for taking the time to read and support me, as always. I wanted to lay out a few minor changes as they pertain to work.

First, I wanted to let everyone know The Restored is out now! You can purchase it here. It is far and away the worst selling book that I have ever published, by over an order of magnitude, so an...