The Third Step: Chapter Twelve

On that somber note, we left the hidden basement level of the tower behind, this time stepping through a hidden trapdoor that went through the stone of the tower’s insides, and out through the front door. 

With Ikki already summoned and ready to train me, Kene peeled off to get a feel for the new alchemy lab, while Dusk and Dawn went to look through the more minor tweaks that Dusk had made to the world, of the sort that went entirely over my head – apparently, she’d altered the air’s pressure and humidity, but I couldn’t feel a difference. 

Ikki crouched in front of me and exploded into motion. I conjured a Combat Echo and Foxstepped behind him while my echo struck out with Foxthorn. Ikki dodged to the side and slashed his sword behind him in a strange, warping arc that scored along my cheek. 

“Again,” he said, and we reset. 

As it turned out, just because the Combat Echo was a part of my mind and spirit, didn’t mean that it was easy to beat Ikki with. It didn’t try to make the same motions as me or anything of that sort – even if I wasn’t actively interpreting its sensory information, it was just another body for the same spirit, and we understood not to do something of that sort. 

No, the difficult part in coordination was that my combat echo and I were still the same mind, which meant it was still infinitely worse than Ikki’s frankly absurd level of skill. He still rarely needed to push his spellcraft beyond early third gate in order to beat me, even with my ability to make echoes. Worse, my echo was a rough copy, and one that didn’t have the same absurd level of bodily energy that I had, meaning it – I? Simulcra were weird – would sometimes try to act with actions that it wasn’t strong enough to manage.

Truthfully, I suspected that even when I ingrained the spell and could pre-charge my copies with my full physical and magical strength, I wouldn’t be able to beat Ikki.

By the time our hour was up, I’d gotten a better handle on only using the body I was currently in – a weird statement – and was confident in using my echo to at least take and divert blows in a similar manner to how Mallory’s mom had been able to use temporary copies against the desolant colony and its queen. 

We showered and went to bed not long after that, and the ship departed from Delitone a mere two days later. I briefly swung by the preserve to say hello to Octavian’s parents, as well as to open a portal for him to return to the preserve, but I spent most of the rest of the time, as well as the time onboard the ship working. 

Orykson had suggested that I create a method for holding and storing potions, weapons, and even air for myself, and he’d forced me to practice drawing air in from Dusk’s realm in order to breathe in the ocean, only fishing me out when it looked like I was actually going to drown.

I didn’t have any major weapons that were worth creating a pocket space for, and even if I did, I could have stored them in Dusk. I could store potions in Dusk too, but there was much more of a point to having spaces specifically for holding potions. 

Using Transport Item on potions was costly, as I had to transport an energy-dense liquid. It was second gate, to Reposition Anchor’s third, and transporting a pocket space tied to an anchor would also be costly, as I had to move what was in said pocket space. 

Usually, I was best served throwing my potions, since that didn’t cost mana at all, but I’d encountered situations where using Transport Item was useful. Similarly, I thought there would be times where simply being able to directly teleport a pocket space holding a potion would be useful to let me cut out the time needed for summoning the potion to me, then teleporting said potion. 

So I set to work on creating an enchanted item. 

Orykson had forced me to create one before, using markers and a cardboard box to warp the space within. It had been terrible, and taken way too much time, but I’d done it. Luckily for me, I knew someone who was good at enchanting, and who actually enjoyed  it. He couldn’t do the entire process, but he could handle the worst part of cutting spellforms into the physical material. 

Thus while I’d been in Delitone, I’d purchased a chunky bracelet of the blue-white marble stone that was omnipresent in the city, and portaled over to visit Ed. He agreed to use his stone carving magic to cut the spell arrays that I’d lay my own Spatial Anchor and Create Pocket Space into in order to form the permanent enchantments. With the help of Dusk, who remained on the ship, I was able to portal back and forth from Crysite to enchant with Ed, and back to the ship when he had to work. 

I spent that time crafting potions. I’d outgrown a lot of my old stock, and while that was perfectly fine for things like a nutrition potion, or a self-warming potion, where packing more intense mana in would either have no effect or would actually be detrimental, it was far less useful for my combat potions. 

The first thing I started on was condensing some acid, combining the acid-drip creosote bush and the frozen pitcher plants to create a powerful acidic potion that ate through skin, flesh, and bone. I’d feel awful about using it on a person, but it could be useful against zombies or skeletons, and in the tournament there would be healers on standby to prevent any real damage from being done. 

After that, I used the firecreep, ash willow, and saltpeter to create firebomb potions. Even with my advancement, they were far worse than the fireballs that Liz could throw around when the mood suited her, but they were still one of my more potent forms of attack, stronger than blademoss or my Foxfyre.

Following the firebombs, I started working on healing potions. They wouldn’t be as useful in a tournament for saving my life, but they might be able to prolong how long I was in each round, and they also were just good to have on hand. Kene had made their own stock, and they weren’t shackled to generic regeneration potions, able to create better ones for specific wounds, but it was still impossible to know when a healing potion might come in handy. 

When we were a mere day away from Obsidian Forest, we completed it. A bracelet with six beards of marble, each one connected to a separate pocket space. The marble was ordinary stone, not structure-ore, so I couldn’t connect too large of a space to each one, but I didn’t need the space to be large. It only needed to hold a small amount of liquid for each potion. 

Better yet, since self-made, bound, and rewarded items were the only sort of enchanted item or potion that was allowed to be used in tournament rounds, I could use my new fancy enchanted item in the fights. 

Out of curiosity, I took it to the enchanted item shop in Mossford where I’d gotten my very first spatially expanded briefcase, to see how much it would sell for, and they offered me eighty silver – while it was true they could market it as a potion deploying bracelet, the spaces were small, and when it came to selling pocket spaces, volume was king. 

That was a little discouraging, given how long Ed and I had spent on it, but it wasn’t enough to diminish the excitement that came with creation. We’d created something together, and that was, well, fun. Ed had even handled most of the boring parts himself! 

Within the six spaces, I stored an even split of firebombs and acid potions, and turned my attention to my final task before we disembarked in Obsidian Forest: Depths of Starry Night. 

The third layer of the mana mediation was far more complex than the first and second combined, as tended to be the case with mana meditations and spells alike, but I was a whisper away from mastering it. I was confident with just a bit of time, I’d be able to finish, and my spirit would begin to cycle my mana in that pattern of its own accord. 

I had spent so long practicing the simple, downward-pounding and upward-wrenching motion of the meditation that I’d actually entirely forgotten what the effect would be when I mastered it. I knew the broad strokes, of course – it would continue to improve the overall efficiency of my spells, making them do just a bit more for a bit less. 

It was the other effect, the one similar to choosing the power of constellations and fortune, that I’d forgotten, so I grabbed the text from the shelf in the alchemy room and looked it over. 

Once I completed the third layer, I would need to select a spell, one that wasn’t a pure combat spell, and that was reasonably small. Things like Foxfyre or Mantle Dragonfyre were entirely out of the running, as would any of my full-gate spells, but I’d be able to select a spell for utility or quality of life. Similarly to the way that the effects of choosing between the brightness of a star, the strings of constellations, or the void of space hadn’t been described, the exact ‘what’ of choosing a spell was vague, only that I would need to. 

Again, I wondered if this would help me form my roots. I doubted it would actually form them – normally, that was reserved for Arcanists, and Edgar had never even done it himself. But it could be laying the groundwork. Then again, it might not do that at all. 

Contented enough, though still full of questions, I began practicing my mana meditation. I was flowing through the long, stable positions, moving my spirit around, when Dawn slipped into my mana-garden. As she did, she began pulsing her dominion, moving it in time with the meditation, and I slowly felt myself drawing closer and closer, until… 

There! 

The world seemed to fade away as my mana started to rotate and twist of its own accord, and I was drawn into my mana-garden. Unlike when I pulled myself in through focus, however, this time I floated over my garden like a ghost, barely visible even to myself. Before me, the rainbow strings of light from the kirin spell continued to hum as they always did, but it almost seemed brighter than usual. 

I only had a moment to think that before I saw my spells bein to pulse with nine-colored light, happy to reveal themselves as sources for me to direct my meditation. I was able to immediately dismiss several of them, like Create Pocket Space. Even if I had actually made something out of it, it would never be a spell core to who I was. 

Other spells, though, were harder to dismiss. Any of my anchor spells would doubtless make a potent choice, as would one of my sensory spells. Foxstep, Seven League Step, Quality Lifespan, the list of useful spells went on and on. 

Perhaps if I’d known exactly what the effect would be, this would be easier, but I guessed that was impossible. There was no way that the starfall could have been predicted, after all, so there was no way for the book to warn me. Similarly, I would bet that it was impossible to know what the effect of marking a spell would be. 

But I did need to choose. I could feel my mind slipping away, and I didn’t want to know what would happen if I exited the strange trance without making a choice.